Fox Business host Stuart Varney said on Tuesday that his theory of "global cooling" had been proven when a research ship recently got stuck in ice near Antarctica.

The habitual climate-change denier reported that all 52 passengers of the Russian-flagged MV Akademik Shokalskiy had been rescued by helicopter after Chinese and Australian ice breakers had tried for days to reach the vessel.

"The ship, sent to the Antarctic to study climate change, has been stranded in the ice for 10 days," Varney noted. "Attempts to rescue the passengers using ice breaker ships failed. Rescuers finally got through using a whopping, great big helicopter that was landing on the supposedly, very thin ice."

"So, it looks to me like we are looking at global cooling," he added. "Forget this global warming. That's just my opinion."

On Varney's show in 2012, Fox Business reporter Tracy Byrnes argued that climate change was a hoax because the temperature of the Earth "basically hasn't changed much since the Ice Age."

Reader Comments

I'm still waiting for the Physics of how a trace gas imparts energy back into the environment several times greater than what it received. That would be the fudge number used in the Global Warming models (computer programs).

Er yeah. The warmist physics seems to be that of Arrhenius which considers only radiative transfers. The idea is that when the Earth's surface warms up it emits a radiative spectrum that approximates that of a black body i.e. the radiative peak of the emitting surface is shifted towards longer wavelength compared to the incoming solar radiation peak as the Earth is cooler than the sun. A greater fraction of this now outgoing radiation is absorbed and re-emitted by greenhouse gasses than was absorbed and re-emitted when the radiation was incoming from the sun. In fact the calculated additional radiation is 1.7W/m^2 or about one thousandth of the original incoming. As they themselves conceed this would hardly be a problem so they have to invoke "climate sensitivity". This is a hypothesis in which it is deemed that this tiny additional amount of energy causes more surface evaporation of water. The resulting additional water vapour amplifies the effect as it is a much more powerful GHG than CO2.

I must caution that I use the word "seems" as I assume that this is what is in the secret computer models that produce the warmist projections as to what future global temperatures will be.

Right that is the theory but it is incomplete. It only considers radaition to radiation transfers and ignores the more important "thermal to radiation" transfers as indeed do most global warming skeptics who have perpetuated this neandertal debate for decades for one simple reason: Almost the entire cohort of global warming skeptics believe in global warming too! They just believe it too be much less than the warmist crowd. For this reason the debate is monopolised by two groups who believe in global warming and contrary to the apparent opposition declared in the media they need each other like bread needs butter.

OK the physicsy bit. The part no one seems to look at....

A large part of the thermal energy of the Earth's surface is carried into the atmosphere by conduction, convection and the latent heat of evaporation of water. Note that in my opinion if the Earth had no atmosphere then the Earth's surface would be warmer at equilibrium because the surface would have to radiate all this additional energy (i.e. that not carried away into the atmosphere as described) out into space directly itself. As the only way to get additional radiation out of a black body is to turn up the temperature this must be the case. Warmists and skeptics alike however agree that the atmosphere warms the planet. Yes I can believe that it acts as a buffer at night but I deal with the simpler cases as used to obtain basic understanding. I am sure you can guess what they are.

OK The elementary missing bits of the warmist/skeptic theory is that while all gasses radiate as do all accelerating charges the GHGs have additional vibrational modes which can 1) convert radiation to thermal energy 2) convert thermal energy to radiation.

1) Is the basis of global warmism/skepticism
2) Is the missing bit from the hypotheses of warmism/skepticism. It must stay missing in either for these two groups to exist.

The points:
Thermal energy transported directly into the atmosphere from the surface is converted more efficiently into radiation at vibrational mode wavelengths by GHGs than by non-GHGs (actually it is pretty much zero for non-GHGs). This means the more GHGs in the atmosphere the more "back radiation" impinges upon the surface of the planet. Strange that the warmists missed this as at first sight it would be more grist to their mill. Of course there is the knotty little problem that the GHGs also radiate more thermal energy into space through this mechanism also which is why it has to be left out of the grand theory as the resulting net increase in outgoing radiation. I hardly need to tell you that by increasing the amount of radiation from a warm object is going to cool it.

Now even the IPCC acknowledge that GHGs cause enhanced radiation out into space in the upper atmosphere so they do know about the mechanism but limit this to these very high altitudes. The reason for this limit is not discussed of course however they can get away with it because the lapse rate law is imperfect for a planet warmed from above rather than below. This leads to wibbly bits in the lapse rate curves at the tropopause and higher as the upper atmosphere is also and significantly heated by the sun. If the lapse rate law applied at the way up to outer space they would have to conceed that GHGs cause cooling throughout the atmosphere right down to the Earth's surface - and resign their positions, salaries and pension expectation.

So does the cooling effect of thermal to radiatiative transfers due to GHGs hold below the tropopause? The answer is a resounding "yes". GHG cooling applies right down to sea level in the atmosphere fraction where the lapse rate law holds in full. Cooling in any part of this region leads to cooling at the surface due to this law derived from the gas law and the first law of thermodynamics. This is why:

While it is often noted that radiative emissions in gasses are isotropic (equal probability in all directions) it is also assumed implicitly that the net radiation flux from the continuous stream of absorbtion and emission events occuring within a GHG laden atmosphere is also based upon this isotropy, i.e. it all photons proceed in a random walk resulting in a net radiation flux which lacks direction. This is a false assumption based only upon emission events. The subtle missing bit here is that the atmosphere is less dense as altitude increases and so photons emitted with an upward component travel further in the upwards direction (until an absorbtion event) than do photons emitted with a down wards component travel downwards.

The easiest way to see this is by considering the average joint position of two photons emitted from the same level in the atmosphere with equal and oppositite vertical components. The one going up travels further than the one going down (on average) so their joint average position increases in altitude with each pair of emission/absobtion events.

I have done some limited arithmetic on this and the net position increases in altitude by a few millimeters for each pair of events. This leads to a net upwards radiations flux of radiation at GHG wavelengths which at saturation can be kilometers per second.

So GHGs cool the planet. The effect is obviously self limiting - it has its own negative feedback - so GHGs are a very good thermostat for the planet keeping the planet within its habitable zone.

I keep meaning to derive the full theory but wonder what the point would be. At best I would end up preaching to idiots enthrenched in their belief systems of various origins instead I adopt the cloaking isolation of arrogance which I find a great comfort.